Watersports involving powered watercraft have enjoyed a long history. Waterskiing's decades-long popularity spawned the creation of specialized watercraft designed specifically for the sport. Such “skiboats” are optimized to minimize the wake in the water behind the watercraft's hull, thereby providing the smoothest possible water to the trailing water skier.
More recently, watersports have arisen at the other extreme, by actually taking advantage of, and benefitting from, the wake produced by a watercraft. Sports such as wakesurfing, wakeboarding, wakeskating, kneeboarding, and others use the watercraft's wake to allow the participants to perform various maneuvers or “tricks” including becoming airborne.
To address this changing market, skiboats dedicated to a single watersport have yielded to a new type of watercraft known as a “wakeboat”. Wakeboats seek to more completely manage the spectrum of wakes that are produced behind the hull—diminishing it for some activities, while enhancing it for others.
Many techniques have evolved to manipulate the wake produced by the hull of a wakeboat. One method, as described by U.S. Pat. No. 6,427,616to Hagan and incorporated herein by reference, is to selectively pump water aboard the wakeboat to act as ballast, changing the mass of the wakeboat and thus the displacement and draft (depth in the surrounding water) of its hull. The amount of ballast is often measured and recorded, on the theory that a desireable wake can be reproduced by duplicating the ballast amounts.
Another approach is to use hydrofoils (sometimes characterized as “wings”), trim tabs/plates, water diverters, or other hydrodynamic control surfaces to selectively change the effective mass of the wakeboat as it moves in water. (While hydrofoils and trim tabs/plates have historically been used to elevate the hull, in wakeboat applications these control surfaces are sometimes inverted to yield the opposite effect.) Parameters such as control surface depth and angle are often measured and recorded, again in the hopes of recreating a desireable result on demand.
Semi-permanent features, such as the presence and amount of lead, other metals, sandbags, and other heavy objects are also used to affect the wake or wave behind the hull.
Ballast, control surfaces, weight bags, and the like are not the only variables affecting the relationship of the hull to the surrounding water. Other parameters such as the number and weight of passengers, amount of fuel, amount of equipment, and supplies such as food and potable water all contribute. Some wakeboats even employ specially shaped hulls to increase or decrease their displacement, and hence their effective mass, while moving through water. It is the aggregate of these variables, and their effects on the hull, that determine the wake or wave that forms behind it.
Unfortunately, this aggregation and the resulting interactions are not obvious, nor easily understood, nor managable by the operator of the wakeboat. There has been no concise, convenient method to summarize this information and convey it to the operator. The result has been often vain attempts by operators to roughly estimate this information and then apply that estimation, via experimentation, to the watercraft on a day-by-day basis. The inability to accurately reproduce a desired wake or wave as all of the estimated variables change—often during the course of a single day—is a large source of frustration for watercraft operators, dealers, manufacturers, and the wakeboat industry in general.
The present disclosure provides apparatus and methods that enable the operator to more accurately control the wakes and waves produced by the wakeboat.